We live at a time when we aspire, as never before, for tolerance, for freedom from discrimination and for the inclusion of everyone, whatever their race or appearance. Despite these noble aims acceptance of facial difference has never been harder. Social media, “photoshopped” pictures, cosmetic surgery, botox and cosmetic adverts all present us with a standard for facial perfection that we are told we should pursue. We are all made to feel that we should be gorgeous and ageless. What if you are born different? Born with a face that is, to many eyes, disfigured. Born with a craniofacial disorder. How do you find acceptance in our facially perfect world?

Well, it is hard beyond belief and requires a special kind of unseen and unrecognised courage. If asked what a congenital craniofacial disorder is, most people would just think of a cleft lip or palate. In reality, they are much more than this, forming a range of diverse and complex disorders. Names like Apert’s or Crouzon’s syndrome sound benign, their names commemorating the long-dead doctors who first described them, but to an affected child they mean being born with a distorted skull and with eyes in the wrong place. To ignorant eyes to be born non-human. In the past to be banished to a circus freak show.

As a child, if you live in the West, you face complex surgery to reduce your disfigurement. For 12 hours you lie on an operating table whilst your face is skinned by a surgeon, your skull cut into pieces and then reassembled like a jigsaw. Even then your life will be one of people staring and whispering, crossing the street to avoid you and judging you by your appearance. As a child in most of the rest of the world you face a future with no chance of changing your appearance, a life as an outcast, an existence as someone marked by the devil.

How do we change this?
We accept that which we know and because what we know is no longer strange, it is understood.

Fortunately facial disfigurement is rare, but this very fact makes it alien to most people and thus harder to accept. Charities like the Children’s Craniofacial Association work to educate people, work to support affected children and their families, work to make a better future.

What if we learnt to accept facial difference as children? Learnt that looking different is skin deep. Learnt that real beauty lies within.

Jessica BunnyDuck is different. She looks different, but within she is the same as her friends; a happy fun loving child. Reading her adventures you love her infectious joy and how she fits in with her new family. Her bunny ears do not define her, in the end they simply do not matter.

In truth, stories about looking different have been popular for centuries as some of our most beloved fairy stories. The Ugly Duckling, the Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast all make us love someone who, at first sight, is ugly or even hideous. Good triumphs and, in the end, how the hero looks no longer matters. However fairy stories take place in a different world and a different time, when goblins lurked in caves and dragons flew.

In 1985 Cher won the award for best film actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of the mother of a boy with “lionitis” in the film “Mask.” She battles for him to be accepted in mainstream education where he triumphs academically and gains acceptance from his classmates. At the film’s end he dies as a teenager from his condition. The film was based on the life and early death of Roy “Rocky” Dennis. Cher’s performance was from the heart and she went on to support children with craniofacial disorders through the work of the Children’s Craniofacial Association.

Jessica BunnyDuck lives now. She does things children do now. They live in her world and she in theirs. She is a modern fairy story and as she makes children smile and laugh she teaches them to accept that looking different is not important, that the child at school with the different face is just like them. Jessica BunnyDuck has so much to give us all; she only needs to be given the chance to show us.

Dr. Michael Twitchen FFD RCSI (Oral Medicine), MBBS, LMSSA, BDS, LDS RCS(Eng)